If your business has only one salesperson, or if you are ready to hire your first one, consider hiring two instead.

Sale Reps are Naturally Competitive—You Will Get More Value by Hiring Two and Letting them Compete

A lone salesperson will have very little to gauge their own performance with, while two will continually try to outdo each other.
– From The Startup Daily

In many industries it has become standard practice to treat vendors and other partners like the enemy. They are given little respect, and squeezed for every dime.

If you plan to stay in business for any length of time, you need to eradicate this short-term thinking.

Give Your Partners the Same Level of Service and Respect that You Give Your Customers

In most cases, your goals are the same—to increase the size of your respective pieces of pie. You can achieve this by fighting over the same slices, or by increasing the overall size of the pie. By fostering collaborative relationships, you and your partners can share valuable insights and knowledge that can help you both grow your businesses.

Instead of being unpleasant and adversarial, your relationships with partners can become one of the most valuable parts of your business.
– From The Startup Daily

Too much text is the kiss of death for a presentation. Never put the whole text of your presentation into the slides and then read them aloud. Since the audience cannot read and listen at the same time, they will tune you out.

If You Want People to Listen to Your Presentation, Don’t Cram Your Slides with Text

A slide is best used to reinforce a single key idea or emotion. A strong graphic with one or two words is often enough. It is the presenter’s job to convey the details and hold it all together with a compelling story.
– From The Startup Daily

When consumers have trouble differentiating between products, they will fall back on shortcuts to help them make their decisions.

Quality Conscious Consumers Will Often Choose The More Expensive Product Automatically

If understanding the difference between your product and the competition’s requires more time or effort than customers are willing to invest, they will base their decision on the simplest measure that aligns with their priorities: “expensive=good.”

Consumers focused on quality will remember the rule of “you get what you pay for”, even when price is the only evidence that the quality is higher.

– From The Startup Daily

This is not a tactic of denial or avoidance, but a way to gain new perspective. Your biggest challenge is probably quite different from what you think it is.
The Obstacle that You Perceive as Being Your Biggest Problem May Actually be Blinding You to the Real Problem

Like the layers of an onion, you must peel back the top layer to expose the next.

Start with your biggest problem and ask yourself “why is this a problem?” When you find the answer, ask “why is that a problem?” Keep asking and you will find the real heart of the problem, usually in just a few layers.
– From The Startup Daily

When you are presenting your ideas to investors, don’t try to impress them with your understanding of industry jargon. Keep it simple.

Explain Your Ideas in Terms that Even Your Mom Would Understand

In fact, this is good advice for presenting ideas to customers, employees, and just about anyone else. If your mom wouldn’t understand it, simplify the idea until she would.
– From The Startup Daily

Even in failure there is success. No matter how big a problem, if you look closely you are bound to find some small pockets that have arrived at a solution.

Search for the Anomalies that have Already Found Solutions

Identify these positive deviants and focus on replicating and scaling up their behaviors.

Most of the world’s most difficult problems have already been solved, the solutions are just not where everyone else is looking.
– From The Startup Daily

No matter how hard you try to satisfy your customers, unexpected problems will cause some experiences to be less than perfect. You can safeguard against many problems by building goodwill.

Surprise Your Customers by Delivering More than You Promised

When you provide something of value that they didn’t expect, customers will like you more, and they will be more forgiving of mistakes.
– From The Startup Daily

Big improvements are often the result of incremental changes in behavior. Yet most reward systems are only setup to recognize the end results.

When you reward results without taking into account the behaviors that led to the results, you may be rewarding behaviors that are ultimately harmful. You may be inadvertently encouraging people to increase output by sacrificing quality, or to take short-term gains at the cost of long-term losses.

Reward Behaviors, Not Just Results

By rewarding the behaviors you want to encourage, your initiatives won’t be derailed by those who would game the reward system and damage the overall strategy.
– From The Startup Daily

For the boss, no little thing goes unnoticed. You may be distracted and therefore you don’t notice when you fail to acknowledge an employee you just passed in the hallway, but that employee has certainly noticed.

Employees Read into Every Interaction with the Boss as Reflection of their Own Performance

People are always looking for additional feedback about how well they are doing their job, and how they compare with others. As the boss, you must remember that people are watching and interpreting your behavior.
– From The Startup Daily